Anxiety about the Meaning of History: The Response and Pathology of “Universal History”

The timeliness of historical process points to a sense of historical vicissitudes, the core of which is historical impermanence, manifested in the accident, change and disorder of historical process, which leads to anxiety about the meaning of survival in history. Western thought treats this historical impermanence as the nihility of historical significance, and resists the historical impermanence through the “universality” established by the “universal history”. The universality that best reflects the character of Western civilization is composed of two traditions: the first is the conceptual thinking tool provided by ancient Greek philosophy, which enables universality to be established in the language and its logical mechanism in the way of conceptual movement, and this universality is regarded as a pure “form” separated from all materials; second, it is provided by Christianity, especially the Pauline tradition, which means transcendental universality that cuts off all concreteness and particularity, and at the same time it links historical significance to the eschatological future, and this future means a “special moment” that is both in time and can dissolve time-history and reach eternity. The combination of the above two forms the universality in modern western historical philosophy. This kind of universality responds to the “meaning of history (as a whole)”, but it already contains a depreciation of “meaning in history”. In this sense, it means the non-historical treatment of history. Therefore, it is difficult to avoid the pathology of the end of history, which ultimately leads to the loss of historical consciousness.